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Hello!

Starting a blog is an exciting and slightly scary thing. Choosing a name, picture and profile to convey something about you and your blog is a little daunting. As may be somewhat apparent from those choices I am an obsessive reader. Always have been, always will be. I have notebooks full of jottings about the books I have read over the years, and I make lists of what I have read, what I want to read and what I should read. As I said, obsessive.

I am also rather flighty in my reading tastes. Well, maybe not flighty but certainly I do read a very broad range of books. I read a lot of academic history for college. I love Young Adult fiction and a good vampire tale. I sometimes hanker after sci-fi or a huge fantasy epic. Literary fiction, historical fiction, popular history, mid-twentieth century middle-brow novels are all welcome here. And, after a long hiatus, I have just started to read some graphic novels again. My superpower would be the ability to read one book with each eye.

Hopefully all this book chatter will be interesting to someone other than just me. I'll do my best. It's only fair to say that I'm not really interested in writing reviews of books I hated. For a start I am not bad at choosing books for myself, so it is not that often I read something I actually dislike. Also, if I do find something that bad or dull I'll just put it aside, unfinished. And, finally, I want to talk about great books, fun books, quirky books, uplifting books - books to recommend.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!